Women rabbis and Torah scholars

Women rabbis and Torah scholars are Jewish women who have received formal semikhah (rabbinic ordination) as rabbis or are recognized for their studies and contributions to Jewish religious tradition, respectively. The ordination of women in Judaism has grown since the 1970s, with thousands of Jewish women having received formal ordination since then (see § Membership by denomination). The majority of them have been associated with progressive Jewish religious movements, including Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Liberal Judaism (in the United Kingdom), Reconstructionist Judaism, and Jewish Renewal. In Orthodox Judaism, the issue of women's ordination is complex and has not reached a consensus. Although a large and growing number of Orthodox women have received rabbinic ordination,^[1][2] many major Orthodox communities and institutions reject women's credentials if not ordination.^[3][4][5] As an alternative approach, some Orthodox Jewish institutions train women for various formal Jewish religious leadership roles, including entail training in Halakha, but no formal rabbinic ordination is granted. Instead, women receive alternative titles.^[6][7] These women, even with their alternative titles, are often perceived as equivalent to traditionally ordained (i.e., male) rabbis.^[8]

Notwithstanding early examples in Jewish biblical and rabbinic tradition, such as Deborah and Bruriah, for much of Jewish history the recognizable roles of the rabbi (rav), preacher (darshan), and Torah scholar (talmid chacham) were almost exclusively limited to Jewish men. With few, rare historical exceptions, such as the case of Asenath Barzani, Jewish women were first offered the possibility for ordination or an equivalent role beginning in the 1920s,^[9] but it was not until the 1970s when this became widely accepted.^[10] Early efforts to ordain women date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A small cohort of women are recorded as being candidates for ordination; however, eventually, nearly all were denied ordination.^[11] During the 1930s, Regina Jonas of Germany became the first recorded instance of a Jewish woman in modern times receiving formal rabbinical ordination.^[12] Subsequent decades saw women-led campaigns within Reform Judaism for the recognition of women rabbis.^[13][14] These campaigns also coincided with the influence of second-wave feminism on Western society. These efforts culminated in the 1972 ordination of Sally Priesand at Hebrew Union College, the flagship institution of Reform Judaism. Subsequently, women rabbis were ordained by all other branches of Progressive Judaism.^[15] The formal ordination of women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism began in the 2000s, however its acceptance within Orthodoxy is still a highly contested issue.^[16][17] Nonetheless, in the early 2020s, the State of Israel approved legislation to allow all Jewish women to qualify for the state rabbinic examinations, effectively giving Orthodox women a credential equivalent to those of male rabbis. However, the uses of this credential are limited to certain rabbinic roles.^[18]